In what looks eerily like the second coming of the American Dream, anyone can take a product to market in 2024. 

Whether you’re a CEO with a supply chain or an influencer with a phone, you can set up an Amazon Affiliate account or TikTok shop and flog “viral must haves” (knock-off Stanley cups? Drawer organisers? Bagel guillotines?!) to your heart’s content. 

…Or can you?

With profuse thanks to the ACCC’s crackdown, thousands of unfit products are being removed from the market.  

Unethical sellers being forced to delist unsafe products is a huge win. But for the suppliers, retailers, and wholesalers trying to do things right (and understanding that poor quality = returns and bad reviews = bad economics)? 

That’s SupplyScope’s target market.

Meet the product 

SupplyScope connects sellers with a growing network of vetted manufacturers, testing and documentation, easy payments, CRM, and incident management. 

It helps users build products from scratch, using product templates, a component library, digitised product specs, and AI assistance to make it easier than ever. 

Compliance is baked in - making it Australia’s first one-stop platform for all paper trails related to product development, mitigating losses associated with returns, recalls, bad reviews, and potential legal implications.  

We’re investing just as the first wave of VC-backed D2C SaaS (Shopify, Klaviyo, Shippo), is giving way to the next generation of seller-assist software. 

The question is now: how can D2C brands cut through the sea of mass produced, overhyped, conspicuously consumed goods of the anything/anytime Amazon era, and cater to a market (and a regulatory system) that cares about quality? 

Meet the founders

CEO Preet Singh went from consultancy and banking (in his words, “trying to keep my parents happy”) to product development - with a shot in the dark that happened to land. 

His father’s wholesale store was about to shut down, so he turned it into a product development outfit - starting with Preet taking a “wild swing” at sourcing, designing, and supplying a range to Kmart. 

The range was baby products, the name became Ampar Global, and the clients would become Big W, Woolworths, Coles, Target, and Aldi.  

Having cut his teeth in development and compliance for such a high-risk, high-standard category, he founded a few more “small” ecommerce stores (annual 6-7 figures each), and then the award-winning digital marketing agency AEK Media.

Preet is joined by his brother, cofounder, and CTO Raman Singh, who has an extensive corporate finance and investment banking history (Credit Suisse, HSBC, Macquarie). His financial acumen is a valuable complement to Preet’s sales and product brain.

Strategic advisors include compliance expert Rob Wise (ex Target, Catch) who says:

“SupplyScope seems tailor-made to streamline processes across consumer goods and beyond. Potential applications within the chemical and food industries are particularly enticing. We eagerly anticipate SupplyScope delivering a user experience that's not only intuitive but also sets the bar for cutting-edge functionality.”

Meet the problem

Baby stuff is one of the most difficult consumer products to sell - because it should be.

Mired in compliance and regulation, getting them into big box suppliers takes months of testing, paperwork, and investment in safety. 

Suppliers wanting to bypass the strict critera of Kmart or Target have historically gone online, where regulation is looser. 

As a result, the online marketplace is flooded with non-compliance, low quality products across every category imaginable. And by flooded, we mean 87% of banned/recalled products can still be found online. 

Retail monsters such as Shein use hyper intelligent Kanban-like systems to scour the internet for microtrends, churn out test batches, ramp up production on what sells in third-world ghost factories, and ship to digital shelf in days - before regulators can sign off a single stitch. 

"It’s shoot first, ask compliance questions later. But all that’s changing."

Kids Beach ‘Oodies’ were recently recalled for fire hazard concerns. Kylie Jenner’s swimwear got slammed for being unfit for purpose. 

The problem is that the ancient systems of “making stuff” are so slow that rip-off brands, turbocharged by Amazon and TikTok Shop, have outpaced quality assurance. As a result, we have houses full of junk, rivers full of plastic, and huge disadvantages working against the sellers trying to do things right. Preet says:

“The fragmentation is endless. Whether you’re a brand, marketplace or retailer, big or small, we want to be where you design and develop your products, create their technical product specifications, manage quotes from suppliers, ensure you’ve done your product compliance, manage your production and then eventually manage payments to your trading partners.”

Why it’s working

For one furniture manufacturer on SupplyScope’s books, time-to-market has dropped from 6 months to 4 months, and they’ve already reduced testing costs by $30,000.  

A pharmaceutical client predicted that SupplyScope will radically reduce time-to-market from 2 years to 3-6 months. It’s a potentially huge step-change from an intense documentation burden – having to maintain up-to-date product documentation from 10+ different international suppliers. 

It’s a huge step-change the company will be able to start selling D2C for the first time.

A client in construction calculates SupplyScope will save roughly 8 hours a week of Zoom calls managing Chinese suppliers each week.

Why we invested

The block Preet stumbled over has so far been overlooked. 

But he noticed it being increasingly talked about among the companies under the wing of his agency.

“Through my network of founders, I found these workflow inefficiencies and fragmentation of information were not just my problem. The idea sparked when I shared a ‘spreadsheet on steroids’ to a few businesses showing them how to better manage their test reports to save costs, and then they started asking for the platform I was using.”

If we kept a “green ticks” list in our desks for making investment decisions, “customers demanding access to a product while it’s still in spreadsheet form” would definitely be on there. 

Preet likes to use words like “serendipitous” and “lucky”... but we see a dialled-in, borderline ruthless (to himself) entrepreneur with a steady hand. The type who knows how to build and scale processes, and sleeps on factory floors to make sure retail orders are fulfilled. 

We think the brothers are one of the best examples of ‘founder-market fit’ we’ve seen. Preet says:

“Supply chains are so dense and often completely intractable to outsiders. We knew we had something that could simplify it for brands, but we were struggling to communicate the vision to investors. The team at Skalata quickly saw something in it, and put in the time and initiative to  understand the potential value.”  

Part of our JTBD will be helping the founders with this vision decoding. 

Sometimes you need eyes and ears from outside the problem domain - helping tailor the message to those who haven’t lived and breathed the complexities of product and compliance (for almost 2 decades).    

The product has a huge addressable market (think: any physical product supplier ever) but as a backend B2B tool, it’s still relatively underground. We’ll be doing our usual work in refining SupplyScope’s GTM strategy and sales funnel. 

Here’s to an exciting new partnership, and to getting high (returns) on our own Supply(Scope)!

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